I'm not a fan of Proof of Work mining now that a robust Proof of Stake consensus algorithm is fully operational in Ethereum, but if the Bitcoin mining operations stay in the US, their revenue will go toward funding the expansion of domestic infrastructure. It's clearly in US interests to keep mining domestic.
Let them waste someone else's energy. USA is energy-constrained as it is, we don't need miners coming here wasting electricity for their insane project.
Wow, taxed based on how you use your computer huh? Doesn't sounds very American to me. What's next, taxed for fuzz testing? Taxed for using inefficient programming languages?
FWIW I do not support the crypto space either, but if they want to use a computer to run an infinite loop for the end of time that's their business.
Perhaps spending more effort on improving the power grid and using more renewable resources would be a better effort?
Upon further reflection perhaps this is the most American thing that could be done...
The folks who got in early and made millions in Crypto reaped the benefit but no new comers could ever realize the same potential because we've taxed the snot out of it. Closed that loop hole (not that I have much faith in crypto anyway.)
US mines more bitcoin than any other country. The big thing now is using natural gas from oil wells that are not connected to gas pipelines (it's not economical to connect them), so instead of flaring the gas off into the sky, they fuel a generator to power a bitcoin farm using essentially free electricity.
I don't understand why this would be difficult to enforce? It's a tax on companies that are doing crypto mining, not on an individual running mining on their personal machine.
Oh the honor system, we tried that with all the COVID money that we threw around and people bought Corvettes with it. This is just a terrible, unenforceable idea. Say they do get audited, how do you prove how much electricity they used to mine crypto? Unless that company wires a meter directly to the circuit that powers their mining rigs, it will be a total guess.
Well, when someone opens up a Data-center in Texas or New York and buys a whole bunch of Antminers for BTC mining, I think it will be pretty darn obvious what's going on.
I imagine cloud vendors having a new checkbox: are you doing crypto mining? You can lie, but then you’re committing tax fraud in a way that should be easy to prove if they notice you.
It’s the sort of thing they do in banking when they ask what a bank account is for.
I'm saying that any knowledge you think might tip the scales in one direction is inconsequential. You will lose money or gain money depending on the will of those with the most stake. It is never a "smart move" to invest in crypto. It is gambling.
Maybe get a lady friend to blow on your mouse before you click buy.
Never a smart move? It's been the best performing asset like clockwork 3 out of every 4 years since inception, in time with the Bitcoin halving cycles.
There is no basis for the increase in value. Crypto at large is a Ponzi scheme where the increase in amount of suckers buying into it is the sole evidence given for its usefulness.
Every stalwart crypto supporter talks out of both sides of their mouth every time they are questioned about the actual utility of crypto. Is it the future of money (AKA useful liquidity) or is it a great investment that can only increase in value (AKA speculative deflationary asset)?
It cannot be both and it is certainly not useful as money. Makes you wonder why DOES the line go up?
Yeah you'll get rich quick do it - I would suggest paying for some Udemy/Patreon courses to do it effectively though. Oh and you can pay for private discords for the inside scoop
I'm not a good person to ask since I've been drinking the crypto kool-aid since I was an Ethereum miner long ago and now staker. In a world of rampant money printing and inflation and artificial everything, yes I think Ethereum will be useful for a very long time.
Freedom from monetary debasement. An attempt for the first time in human history to have a global currency not follow the "money printing, debasement, start a war to try and fix it/civilization collapse" cycle.
Yes, and while I'm pro-ETH, I'd prefer if Ethereum doesn't surpass Bitcoin as a result of the government abandoning fairness and neutrality, and discriminating agaist some uses of electricity over others.
By the principle that people should be free to expend their resources on whatever they want, whether it's generating crypto, running high-powered gaming computers, or displaying abstract art. When someone buys electricity, does it belong to them, or some totalitarian government that micromanages its private citizens actions? If the former, then what peaceful behavior one uses their electricity for should be of no concern to the laws that restrict our behavior.
If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
That's not really how taxes work. Over the course of the day, I'll buy gas for a car, some art supplies, a few groceries, a pack of cigarettes, and dinner and a beer at a restaurant. The taxes paid on those differ wildly (with the cigarettes and beer definitely taxed with an eye on minimizing consuming of them). Tax is a tool for both revenue generation and behavior shaping; has been for centuries. Nothing totalitarian about it.
In this case, the creation of crypto bits is, ostensibly, wealth creation. Of course the government can tax the materials that go into that asymmetrically, much as many states exempt residential natural gas from tax but not commercial.
If taxes work in a way where it's singling out a behavior that doesn't generate negative externalities, and punishing it to discourage that behavior, then I suggest we change how they work so they no longer do that.
But in fact, they don't work that way. Smoking and alcohol consumption is qualitatively different than mining crypto. Due to how much medical expenses are socialized, they generate negative externalities due to the damage they do to health. So-called sin taxes are also discouraging a behavior that we can objectively state is harmful to the person who engages in it.
There is no objective basis on which to claim crypto mining is more harmful than any other non-essential behavior. Using taxes to punish it is an inappropriate use of government power based on the prevailing standards in the Free World.
> There is no objective basis on which to claim crypto mining is more harmful than any other non-essential behavior.
It generates demand for finite electrical resources that have a net negative externality on the climate. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/09/08/fact.... The argument "But people would be using the electricity for something else if not for crypto" is unsupported; given the uniquely mobile and speculative nature of proof-of-work crypto, it is creating an environment to tap gas wells that would otherwise stay shuttered and increase the rate of the climate slide.
While it is perhaps no more harmful than any other non-essential behavior, it's the non-essential behavior that's driving demand to burn fossil fuels. You put taxes where human behavior is, not where it isn't.
>>It generates demand for finite electrical resources that have a net negative externality on the climate.
The expansion of any industry does that. Singling out crypto suggests something else motivating the measure.
>>The argument "But people would be using the electricity for something else if not for crypto" is unsupported; given the uniquely mobile and speculative nature of proof-of-work crypto,
That argument is not necessary. The point is any non-essential activity that uses electricity has this environmental impact, and said impact could be reduced by taxing CO2 emissions from non-essential activity.
People using Prime95 aren't buying $Hundred-Million of electricity from the Texas Energy Grid during the snowstorm when everyone else was literally freezing and dying in their homes.
The amount of electricity these miners are pulling is insane, and is beginning to affect their neighbors. Its about time we stopped putting up with it.
If there isn't enough electricity to go around it makes sense to do something about it. It seems like the issue is about electricity distribution rather than the use of the electricity. If it is the scale that is the problem then other seemingly unimportant industries using a ton of electricity in a time of crises should maybe also be limited.
Maybe so, but I'm mainly suggesting that such a law be written a way that targets any large scale and wasteful use of electricity rather than being so specific to crypto. Even if that means crypto is the only thing currently affected.
I don't like the idea of a law deciding what you can and can't compute or that some other wasteful industries get a free pass.
> Maybe so, but I'm mainly suggesting that such a law be written a way that targets any large scale and wasteful use of electricity rather than being so specific to crypto
Cryptocoin mining is the easiest thing to get rid of that's both large scale and wasteful.
If you got any other large scale wasteful uses of electricity, please let me know and we can work on getting rid of it too.
> that some other wasteful industries
Please start listing those "other wasteful industries".
At present, there are companies in negotiation with various landowners to set up mining rigs on otherwise-disused natural gas wells.
The wells are too far off the beaten path to be economical to run (some gas sources aren't revenus-positive when you factor in transportation), but building out a small crypto-mining shack next to the well and a small refiner and generator is pretty straightforward, and bits can be transported at a fraction of the cost of gas molecules.
That sort of thing would be trivial to tax with this system, because if you're going to build one of these rigs you have to maintain paperwork with the state to open the well (and if you don't, the EPA does independent monitoring and will eventually say "Hey, what's this huge plume of heated exhaust showing up on infrared coming from this farmer's back-acre?").
Any firm using computing resources, whether owned by the firm or leased from others, to mine digital assets would be subject to an excise tax equal to 30 percent of the costs of electricity used in digital asset mining.
Firms engaged in digital asset mining would be required to report the amount and type of electricity used as well as the value of that electricity, if purchased externally. Firms that lease computational capacity would be required to report the value of the electricity used by the lessor firm attributable to the leased capacity, which would serve as the tax base. Firms that produce or acquire power off-grid, for example by using the output of a particular electricity generating plant, would be subject to an excise tax equal to 30 percent of estimated electricity costs.
Except as otherwise provided by the Secretary, the term “digital asset” means any digital representation of value which is recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger or any similar technology as specified by the Secretary.
The proposal would be effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023. The excise tax would be phased in over three years at a rate of 10 percent in the first year, 20 percent in the second, and 30 percent thereafter.
As someone who's neutral/vaguely positive on crypto (which is to say, it's gonna happen regardless of what any of us think of it) this is a great idea, simple and to the point. Mining crypto is (now DEFINITELY) wasteful; make it more expensive. I'd go higher, even.
I agree crypto mining is wasteful, but I don't think this kind of narrowly targeted tax is the right solution.
ideally the federal government would not have an opinion on what citizens use electricity for, only that the externalities of power generation are priced in.
at a high level, crypto mining is just arbitraging the price of electricity. if the externalities are priced into generation, this is a non issue. if they're not, a tax should be applied that doesn't discriminate by use case.
> ideally the federal government would not have an opinion on what citizens use electricity for, only that the externalities of power generation are priced in.
Only if you take the stance that energy generation and use sure be governed by pure free market economics, which never works out in the real world. Natural resources are limited. Mining/drilling has environmental impacts. People need energy to survive. It makes a lot more sense to go the opposite direction – treat it as a public good (which it is) and regulate usage. Otherwise you will end up in the inevitable reality where there is a large bitcoin mine in town printing cash for its owners and no one living around it can afford to heat their houses.
On an individual level, I agree with this sentiment. However, as power and influence increases, I feel, so too does accountability to the community.
For example, if an individual wants to have christmas lights on their house year round, I think they should be allowed to as long as they can pay their electric bill. However, if a crazy billionaire wants to blast a giant laser into the sky and this causes brown outs due to the power draw to the surrounding community, then I think the community should be able to get the laser shut off. And on the other hand, if the billionaire runs a free entry water park and that causes brownouts, I think the community should be able to decide whether or not to flip the switch.
I'd rather see this mitigated with tiered kWh rates that are still use case agnostic. so the amount of energy needed to heat/cool a reasonable family home could be purchased roughly at production cost, but the rate could step up steeply past that amount. this would either discourage silly laser shows, or at least make sure the community gets funds to build out solar/wind/whatever from the show.
if this approach also discourages free water parks, I'm okay with that. if the community really wants that, they can weigh it against other public interests and consider funding it out of public coffers.
Again, I think that "generally, the government we have now" does as good or a better job of "what the community wants" than whatever it is you're proposing? Especially here?
It's absolutely reasonable -- if not likely -- to think that "the community" thinks of bitcoin mining as a wasteful and stupid idea and is expressing that preference through its politicians. I don't think you're going to see a lot of arguments in terms of "this is political overreach."
I honestly could not care less whether crypto mining is or is not a viable business. I don't do it myself, and I don't hold any crypto. I just hate to see yet random tax meant to appease people who are upset over this week's headline and will move on to being upset about something else next week. it's not an effective recipe for addressing actual root causes of problems.
but yeah, I don't really expect anyone to care much about crypto bros getting a targeted shafting. dueling windmills would probably be a better use of my time.
Yeah, I mean I think "proof of work" crypto is an easy target for an entirely appropriate reason; it's perfectly wasteful, even beyond eg ridiculous Christmas lights.
And now that crypto has better "work functions" e.g. "proof-of-stake," there's just no reason to not tax this.
It seems like in the immediate term, and possibly forever, part of the process of decarbonizing the electricity sector is going to be demand management -- we have a finite amount of clean power available, and bottlenecks (interconnection, permitting, etc.) on the speed with which more can be built, so some of the work will just be discouraging use. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable that, if _some_ use needs to be discouraged, the state should have some opinion as to which use it is that gets the short straw, especially since a flat tax on all use would be super regressive: if higher electricity prices mean some retiree in the sun belt can't afford their AC in the summer and dies of heat stroke, avoiding that by shifting the costs onto crypto bros seems like a no-brainer.
All of this probably becomes even more true as load-shifting becomes a bigger deal. Like: currently, replacing gas-powered boilers for 24/7 industrial processes with electrified heating isn't anywhere near cost-effective if you have to pay peak electricity rates for heating, but there are a bunch of new heat-battery companies spinning up that will take advantage of wholesale fluctuations to generate a ton of heat in the middle of the day when the sun's out, heat up a big box of rocks or whatever, and they siphon off the heat over the course of the day as electricity prices spike in the evening. This could dramatically accelerate industrial-heat decarbonization (which is something like 30% of US GHG emissions), but it only works if there's a price trough to take advantage of; if there are crypto-miners there to gobble up all the curtailed power and stabilize the price, the economics don't pencil out, and we're stuck with gas heat for factories. Again, doesn't seem unreasonable as a thing the state would have an opinion about.
Nothing personal, but the real world has already tried that flavor of "idealism" and it has failed all over the place, which is why governments occasionally, if not often, do get into the business of regulating down to the purpose.
This looks like a variation of the Obama Administration stance on new US based Coal Power Plants: "We are not going to forbid anybody from do it, but we will make sure they go bankrupt in the process of doing it." :-)
It's a smart idea. Who is going to have sympathy for crypto miners? As a citizen, would you rather a Watt of power go to driving an industrial facility, heating a home, or making a Shibacoin? For most it's a very easy calculus.
Either they pay up, in which case there's a new revenue stream, or they don't, in which case energy prices will go down due to the lowering of demand. A win for the general public and an easy sell. Who said policy was boring?
I thought these guys [0] were out of business but at least the website is still alive.
They ma{k,d}e a server that provides heat to your home. Just give it power and internet access, they provide compute loads.
Now that I have solar panels, a hybrid heat pump and currently excess electricity, this is interesting to warm up a vat of tap water, for example.
Any guides on DIYing such a combo?
Interesting; it is difficult to both tax and ban something. Eg if crypto is deemed to be "bad" then how would the US justify profiting from running its operations?
Perhaps a step towards some kind of normalization of crypto in the US.
Ships are on water, their flag doesn't matter much. But charging a tax on activities occurring within the border has the effect of discouraging that activity. You can't slap a different flag on a server and escape the tax.
The Paris MOU was such a success that many parts of the world have Port State Control (rather than Flag State) too now.
If your ship flying Country X's flag docks in Europe then under the Paris MOU your flag decides how likely you are to get inspected by local authorities. Does Country X do a great job? Then inspections will be rare and you've nothing to worry about. Not so much? Expect to spend far more of your visits being inspected and if you don't obey inspection rules under the Port State rules too bad, their port, their laws apply, if you don't like it stop coming to Europe. If Country X don't like it, and I promise they don't give a shit once you paid the registration fee, they can take it up with Europe and see how far that gets them.
Sounds like a win-win. Bitcoin mining farms are contributing nothing to the region where they operate. People will be happy if they packed up and left and drained someone else's energy supply.
So weird seeing such a positive feedback here as opposed to ISPs attempts to break net neutrality when it's exactly the same thing. When you purchase services or commodities, price either should depend on what you're using them for, or it shouldn't.
All societies are engaged in encouraging some behaviors, being neutral about some, and discouraging others. The tools for encouragement and discouragement are almost always, and always should, lie on a continuum from "subtle" to "draconian".
Your proposal amounts to banning the intermediate grades.
I suspect this is not what you actually want. It is certainly not what I want.
I think it’s short sighted to celebrate this. In reality it won’t reduce the demand for bitcoin hashpower. Instead it will force miners to flee to foreign jurisdictions (like Kazakhstan, china, russia, iran, venezuela), who are the least producers of clean energy. The result becomes higher climate impact, loss of domestic taxable income and slower growth of renewable energy due to lowered demand. Not to mention the moral issue of setting a precedent for permissioned electricity consumption .
Who ever said this was about clean energy or carbon whatevers?
This to me, is about not wasting US resources on this. Let other countries waste their electricity on cryptocoin mining if they want to. There's only so much electricity in this country, and there's already plenty of regulations on waste (or attempts to mitigate waste).
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadLet them waste someone else's energy. USA is energy-constrained as it is, we don't need miners coming here wasting electricity for their insane project.
FWIW I do not support the crypto space either, but if they want to use a computer to run an infinite loop for the end of time that's their business.
Perhaps spending more effort on improving the power grid and using more renewable resources would be a better effort?
The folks who got in early and made millions in Crypto reaped the benefit but no new comers could ever realize the same potential because we've taxed the snot out of it. Closed that loop hole (not that I have much faith in crypto anyway.)
You're taxed on how you're using energy. We're also taxed on how we use money. If we buy an electric car, we (used to) get a tax break.
You could see a tax break on energy used to charge an electric car, say.
I don't see anything in this proposal that would prohibit running an infinite loop for the end of time.
how do you know that? are there rankings somewhere? super curious
It’s the sort of thing they do in banking when they ask what a bank account is for.
Smart move?
Maybe get a lady friend to blow on your mouse before you click buy.
https://twitter.com/TimmerFidelity/status/165311478425704038...
Every stalwart crypto supporter talks out of both sides of their mouth every time they are questioned about the actual utility of crypto. Is it the future of money (AKA useful liquidity) or is it a great investment that can only increase in value (AKA speculative deflationary asset)?
It cannot be both and it is certainly not useful as money. Makes you wonder why DOES the line go up?
https://ultrasound.money/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement
If you're saying that inflation in general is bad for the economy, I would encourage you to read this: https://www.britannica.com/money/inflation-vs-deflation
If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
In this case, the creation of crypto bits is, ostensibly, wealth creation. Of course the government can tax the materials that go into that asymmetrically, much as many states exempt residential natural gas from tax but not commercial.
But in fact, they don't work that way. Smoking and alcohol consumption is qualitatively different than mining crypto. Due to how much medical expenses are socialized, they generate negative externalities due to the damage they do to health. So-called sin taxes are also discouraging a behavior that we can objectively state is harmful to the person who engages in it.
There is no objective basis on which to claim crypto mining is more harmful than any other non-essential behavior. Using taxes to punish it is an inappropriate use of government power based on the prevailing standards in the Free World.
It generates demand for finite electrical resources that have a net negative externality on the climate. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/09/08/fact.... The argument "But people would be using the electricity for something else if not for crypto" is unsupported; given the uniquely mobile and speculative nature of proof-of-work crypto, it is creating an environment to tap gas wells that would otherwise stay shuttered and increase the rate of the climate slide.
While it is perhaps no more harmful than any other non-essential behavior, it's the non-essential behavior that's driving demand to burn fossil fuels. You put taxes where human behavior is, not where it isn't.
The expansion of any industry does that. Singling out crypto suggests something else motivating the measure.
>>The argument "But people would be using the electricity for something else if not for crypto" is unsupported; given the uniquely mobile and speculative nature of proof-of-work crypto,
That argument is not necessary. The point is any non-essential activity that uses electricity has this environmental impact, and said impact could be reduced by taxing CO2 emissions from non-essential activity.
The amount of electricity these miners are pulling is insane, and is beginning to affect their neighbors. Its about time we stopped putting up with it.
The IEA suggests the following:
* Chemical manufacturers
* Steelmaking
* Paper mills
* Refineries
Industrial crypto mining is not in good company here.
I don't like the idea of a law deciding what you can and can't compute or that some other wasteful industries get a free pass.
Cryptocoin mining is the easiest thing to get rid of that's both large scale and wasteful.
If you got any other large scale wasteful uses of electricity, please let me know and we can work on getting rid of it too.
> that some other wasteful industries
Please start listing those "other wasteful industries".
The wells are too far off the beaten path to be economical to run (some gas sources aren't revenus-positive when you factor in transportation), but building out a small crypto-mining shack next to the well and a small refiner and generator is pretty straightforward, and bits can be transported at a fraction of the cost of gas molecules.
That sort of thing would be trivial to tax with this system, because if you're going to build one of these rigs you have to maintain paperwork with the state to open the well (and if you don't, the EPA does independent monitoring and will eventually say "Hey, what's this huge plume of heated exhaust showing up on infrared coming from this farmer's back-acre?").
...
Any firm using computing resources, whether owned by the firm or leased from others, to mine digital assets would be subject to an excise tax equal to 30 percent of the costs of electricity used in digital asset mining.
Firms engaged in digital asset mining would be required to report the amount and type of electricity used as well as the value of that electricity, if purchased externally. Firms that lease computational capacity would be required to report the value of the electricity used by the lessor firm attributable to the leased capacity, which would serve as the tax base. Firms that produce or acquire power off-grid, for example by using the output of a particular electricity generating plant, would be subject to an excise tax equal to 30 percent of estimated electricity costs.
Except as otherwise provided by the Secretary, the term “digital asset” means any digital representation of value which is recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger or any similar technology as specified by the Secretary.
The proposal would be effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023. The excise tax would be phased in over three years at a rate of 10 percent in the first year, 20 percent in the second, and 30 percent thereafter.
...
From: https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanati...
ideally the federal government would not have an opinion on what citizens use electricity for, only that the externalities of power generation are priced in.
at a high level, crypto mining is just arbitraging the price of electricity. if the externalities are priced into generation, this is a non issue. if they're not, a tax should be applied that doesn't discriminate by use case.
Only if you take the stance that energy generation and use sure be governed by pure free market economics, which never works out in the real world. Natural resources are limited. Mining/drilling has environmental impacts. People need energy to survive. It makes a lot more sense to go the opposite direction – treat it as a public good (which it is) and regulate usage. Otherwise you will end up in the inevitable reality where there is a large bitcoin mine in town printing cash for its owners and no one living around it can afford to heat their houses.
For example, if an individual wants to have christmas lights on their house year round, I think they should be allowed to as long as they can pay their electric bill. However, if a crazy billionaire wants to blast a giant laser into the sky and this causes brown outs due to the power draw to the surrounding community, then I think the community should be able to get the laser shut off. And on the other hand, if the billionaire runs a free entry water park and that causes brownouts, I think the community should be able to decide whether or not to flip the switch.
if this approach also discourages free water parks, I'm okay with that. if the community really wants that, they can weigh it against other public interests and consider funding it out of public coffers.
It's absolutely reasonable -- if not likely -- to think that "the community" thinks of bitcoin mining as a wasteful and stupid idea and is expressing that preference through its politicians. I don't think you're going to see a lot of arguments in terms of "this is political overreach."
but yeah, I don't really expect anyone to care much about crypto bros getting a targeted shafting. dueling windmills would probably be a better use of my time.
And now that crypto has better "work functions" e.g. "proof-of-stake," there's just no reason to not tax this.
All of this probably becomes even more true as load-shifting becomes a bigger deal. Like: currently, replacing gas-powered boilers for 24/7 industrial processes with electrified heating isn't anywhere near cost-effective if you have to pay peak electricity rates for heating, but there are a bunch of new heat-battery companies spinning up that will take advantage of wholesale fluctuations to generate a ton of heat in the middle of the day when the sun's out, heat up a big box of rocks or whatever, and they siphon off the heat over the course of the day as electricity prices spike in the evening. This could dramatically accelerate industrial-heat decarbonization (which is something like 30% of US GHG emissions), but it only works if there's a price trough to take advantage of; if there are crypto-miners there to gobble up all the curtailed power and stabilize the price, the economics don't pencil out, and we're stuck with gas heat for factories. Again, doesn't seem unreasonable as a thing the state would have an opinion about.
This is the entire point of government.
More like – we will cut subsidies on coal by just a little bit and let them try and get profitable by themselves.
Either they pay up, in which case there's a new revenue stream, or they don't, in which case energy prices will go down due to the lowering of demand. A win for the general public and an easy sell. Who said policy was boring?
Wonder how fast it will be copied elsewhere.
[0] https://nerdalize.cloud/
Perhaps a step towards some kind of normalization of crypto in the US.
You can become a European company operating in the US. You can have a shell company operate the mining. You can show no profit.
If your ship flying Country X's flag docks in Europe then under the Paris MOU your flag decides how likely you are to get inspected by local authorities. Does Country X do a great job? Then inspections will be rare and you've nothing to worry about. Not so much? Expect to spend far more of your visits being inspected and if you don't obey inspection rules under the Port State rules too bad, their port, their laws apply, if you don't like it stop coming to Europe. If Country X don't like it, and I promise they don't give a shit once you paid the registration fee, they can take it up with Europe and see how far that gets them.
Your proposal amounts to banning the intermediate grades.
I suspect this is not what you actually want. It is certainly not what I want.
This to me, is about not wasting US resources on this. Let other countries waste their electricity on cryptocoin mining if they want to. There's only so much electricity in this country, and there's already plenty of regulations on waste (or attempts to mitigate waste).